why jay is the right guy for NIH

and some unsolicited advice for him

many of you know that i am a big fan of jay bhattacharya. he’s a friend and a gatopal™. he’s also the right person to try to fix the fetid swamp DBA “the NIH” and here’s why:

the NIH has had lots of smart people, educated people, skillful people, even probably lots of hard working people (and jay is all of those things) but what it has egregiously lacked, at least at the top, are honest, honorable, good people. and jay is all of those things as well.

and NIH needs that.

i know jay fairly well. we met on twitter and became friends sharing trenches in the covidian conflicts. he and his charming wife have been my houseguests in real life. you really get to know people in person, see who they are. jay is not a fief-builder nor power hungry. he really wants what’s best and understands what science and public health are, and what they should (and should not) be.

“science should be an engine for knowledge and freedom, not something that stands on top of society and says you must do this or else.”

“it shouldn’t be pushing covid vaccines.”

in the age of collins and fauci, the NIH was bent and broken. it became a vast, amoral, dishonest money laundry and gold giving grant factory that cemented itself atop america and desperately damaged not only trust in but the very nature of medical science in these united states.

fauci has been haunting american health since AIDS and AZT. he was the bad guy in like 4 consecutive sequels lying and profiting, playing patron and profiteering. collins was no different.

it was held in high esteem, but the whole place is a trainwreck.

and now at least we know.

and that is what makes this new push around “no, really you need to trust the experts” so ridiculous.

boy did THAT old chestnut explode in the fire of the last 5 years…

“the amateurs” mopped the floor with “the experts.”

it was one of the most unfair fights i have ever seen.

even if these people meant well, most of them simply do not know what they are doing. “experts” are often hilariously inexpert and the fields of epidemiology and public health seem especially rife with people who obviously failed math.

here’s a dozy:

this is a VERY easy question. i can do it in my head almost without trying. (i guarantee you jay can too, he taught me to take nth roots of large numbers while we were drinking wine) assuming a 100% true positive rate, a positive result has a 1 in 51 chance of being correct, so just under 2%. (that’s as far as i got in my head, grab a calculator and you can get to 1.96%)

for a harvard MD to guess “95%” is just plain ridiculous. that’s actually mathematical illiteracy about how to read the sort of test result you’d routinely be expected to share with and interpret for a patient.

NIH is full of people like this.

the implications for “clinical” vs “non clinical” positive for covid PCR testing (or bird flu or whatever they gin up next) are profound.

perhaps not the “experts” you want to trust, even with the best of intentions…

NIH also full of people who are not calm and who do not respond well to crisis and there will always be a next “crisis” or some new hobgoblin to terrify us. many are trying SO hard right now to make “measles” a thing.

they are used to having CDC and NIH cheer lead for fear narrative.

this is not how it used to be and is certainly not how it should be. the purpose of life is not zero disease and most disease is not actually that dangerous until we over-react and make it so.

this was a solved problem before the recent “forgetting of everyhting we used to know to go do everything we used to know not to do.”

you want to see a study in contrasts? watch this.

the NIH was a source of shrill hysteria during covid.

imagine what they’d be like for bird flu and measles with a kamala pick at the helm.

i do not give a rat’s teensy patootie what leaders say. i want to see what they do.

that’s the acid test.

the great barington declaration was a brave act.

jay and martin and sunetra put their careers and reputations on the line to stand up to a wild panic and against the full force of the state to do the right thing. they took real personal risks to stand up for what was right and for public health and took big personal hits to careers weathered relentless attacks.

had this gone another way, they might have been banished form the careers they worked so hard for.

that took real, selfless courage. it took integrity.

these have been qualification that have been altogether missing at NIH and other similar agencies.

and they are qualifications no one should ever discount again.

you saw what “the other way” is like…

the NIH and many other groups need desperately to change.

so what are we going to do about it?

<commence unsolicited advice>

the first thing that needs doing is to take a top to bottom look at just who is getting paid for what. NIH staff hand out a stunning $35 billion a year in grants, about 60,000 grants a year (164 a day) with basically zero accountability and remarkably low levels of transparency.

more astonishingly, when some of these grants or other associated NIH generated intellectual property generate profits or royalties, not only can the NIH get paid, but so too can individual staffers.

most astonishing, the staffers are not required to disclose this, even to NIH.

these can range from tiny to enormous. the NIH (and folks there) raked in billions on the covid vaccines. no one is quite clear who got what to call this “conflict of interest” seems woefully inadequate.

• from 2010 to 2016, 27,000 royalty payments were made to 1,800 NIH employees.

• this was over $193 million in payments.

imagine where they went under covid.

and this is where it needs to start.

full, relentless sunlight on all money and all conflict.

NIH should not work like a venture capital fund where the staffers get to use the american people as LPs and keep the returns for themselves.

it’s cronyistic and absurd.

this one seems fairly easy and non-controversial.

but the bigger question is “should the NIH be in the grant giving business at all?”

i would argue that it should not.

frankly, i think they should just stop. the work they fund is mostly ridiculous, duplicative, needless, or crowds out private sector work that would face the sorts of selectors that would ensure the money was better allocated and better spent.

government institutions inevitably wind up captured and they spray around cash for partisan and patronage purposes or just fund friends that do things that are outright stupid or potentially far worse.

it’s all well and good to laugh at the experiments about “transgender mice etc” and say “ok, that sucks if you’re a mouse, but on society scale, it probably did not do that much harm” and perhaps you’re right (though maybe not by keeping whole industries of trans scientists in tenure and publication influence) but it really can start to do PILES of damage if you’re not careful.

sylvain lesne, the fraudster from the university of MN who used photoshop to fake some of the seminal data in alzheimer’s and led to decades of running down the blind alley of “amyloid plaques” was an NIH poster child. they bragged about him. they also funded him to the tune of ~$8 million. that bought him a ton of influence. they also funded some of his disciples (also committing fraud) and helped prop up an ecosystem that set research on a debilitating condition back decades.

you all saw covid with suppressing the effective and pushing the fraudulent (esp when the royalties roll in)

how many of these have there been?

far more than chance would seem to dictate.

but this is not even the worst of it.

control of the gold giving for “the science” and “peer review” is control of narrative. it’s how you get a zillion crappy little un-replicable studies showing that boys are really girls and climate change causes fascism and bad HBO movies. it underpins 1000 little attacks on reason and reasonableness. government funded “the science” is nearly all pay for play propoganda.

and medicine is no different.

you put this much money on the table and big pharma will act as badly or worse than any other group on earth and capturing government funding is as easy walking through a revolving door.

they are not acting in good faith.

they are corrupt and it is not fixable. this kind of money ALWAYS corrupts.

here, watch 2006. see if it sounds familiar.

it’s not that the agency officials didn’t learn anyhting. it’s that they did. they learned how to profit from their central position in this ecosystem.

they always will.

and this is the biggest problem of all.

i respect and trust jay. i don’t think he would do these things, at least not on purpose and would certainly go to great lengths to avoid mistakes.

but a system that only works when run by spectacularly intelligent, effective, and moral people is not realistic.

it’s utopian nonsense.

it’s “communism, just needing smarter guys this time since 1917!”

to really fix this system, we need to shrink it. i’m not sure how politically palatable “getting the government entirely out of the grants game” can really be, but we need to make it more so. we need to end this for good and all.

there is no “safe dose.” it’s feeding an addict. you let the state start to decide what “the science” to settle on by funding its partisans and starving its detractors and you rapidly land in the same place. universities run on this. tenure is gained by it. business suck up to it. every research discipline grows dependent and myopic. the first topic of study is always “what conclusions do i need to have to get money from the state?”

that’s not science. that’s totalitarian dogma with a layer of pretext slap-painted over the rust.

this is how you get 97% of scientists agree. the rest get no money and got crowded out and attacked by grant funded media machines.

ultimately, this needs to go before congress, perhaps the supreme court. people need to challenge the legality, the constitutionality of these grants. let the cases come and then have the agencies concede and settle. make it the case law of the land that the grant grift is over.

this will take the most bravery of all because inevitably the hostage puppies will be trotted out and slaughtered. “what about pediatric cancer!” what about “save the fluffy butted hedge warbler?” there will be innumerable outrages. but this is not different than saying “well what about banning speech that makes fluffy bunnies cry!?!” you simply cannot grant this power ever or especially for things you want. because one day, that power will be wielded by people you hate and who, perhaps, hate you.

“we just need to fund my one special thing” is the gateway drug to “the government decides what science is and crowds out everyone else.”

it’s not enough to just “stop doing it under my watch.” it has to be removed from the panoply of potential possibility for good and all.

and that will be the most fearsome fight of all. it’s going to make covid look like a scuffle. the size of the aligned interests and their scope are staggering. and they are not going to play nice.

strength and honor, jay.

you’re going to need both.